4ourth Mobile is a Thing Now

Long before I had a day job, I freelanced. I did design work when I was in Junior High. Actually, I recall that first paid job (sure, my dad worked there) they weren't happy with the results. Probably worth thinking about more and writing a whole post about how early failures made me the type of conscientious designer I am today. Later. I've made over half my income some years from freelance or contact work, and while it petered out in the past few years, when we all lost our jobs a year ago, making a virtual agency seemed a natural. I've been sorta calling the freelance work I do since then part of the 4ourth Mobile brand, and the Designing Mobile Interfaces book Eric and I are writing has a strong online presence at a wiki under that same site. But I haven't really marketed it in any particular way. Well, now I probably should get on that. Yeah, maybe this is old hat for everyone else, but I've never actually bothered to incorporate anything before. I just faked it, filed a Schedule C and made do. Accountant friends forced my hand here for tax reasons, but really it's a good idea. So, consider this the official announcement: 4ourth Mobile is a thing. Call it a virtual mobile design agency. If you think well of one of our tweets, or blog post, or The Big Book of Mobile Design, contact us. We can do training, or design, or user research, or just chat about your needs and see if our concept of a mobile strategy is the same as yours. We're even multi-national, and can travel, so whatever your needs, ask and we'll talk about it.

Clicking behavior in web browsers

I got challenged earlier today to back up our assertations that history menus in web browsers are poorly used. So, off to the internet to do research. Or, rather, find other's research. Found a really neat paper that solved all our problems. A 2007 study (and there are no others for years before) that looks at lots and lots of user click data, and reviews the whole state of the browser today vs. what it's being forced to be. Worth it if you design interactive systems at all, and especially for any of the webs. If you have an ACM account, you can download the paper from here: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1240624.1240719 Or, there's a slideshare of it in summary.

Web Page Revisitation Revisited

View SlideShare presentation (tags: chi07 chi chi2007 web)

Form Submissions

Aaron Barker was just IMing me with some questions about form submission standards (such as they were) when I was at Sprint. We won't get into those, as they are muddied, and full of politics as well as design issues. He's got a similar issue, though, working in a big group, for a huge organization, trying to settle standards for it all. But one bit of info informing his question was a post by Luke Wroblewski on buttons. Its interesting, but I think flawed in some ways. Check out the heatmap. That must imply rigor. Well, its nice, but I'd rather have seen the numbers for speed to complete. Its mentioned in the text, but the article is overburdened with these graphics. Which, since they are what you'd expect, aren't that interesting. Overall, I am most disappointed with the dataset tested. I have always said that the primary design principles you can mess with are:

1. Position
2. Size
3. Shape
4. Contrast
5. Color
6. Form

(Form is like type weight, and other minor changes, but to familiar elements so its relevant. Still last though.) Many others have their own ideas. I am sorta enamoured of the time-based ones, and will have to ponder that a bit more. But working off my theory, items D, E & F changed position, but did not address the shape, contrast (minimally) or color aspects under test in A, B & C. Were it me, I'd have tested A-C, then re-tested with those results to make a set that tries out position changes independently. (Also, the use of that faded gray background under the buttons is way too specific an element for anything I'd test in this sort of research; I wouldn't go past space and an HR). But still, I have a problem with the A-C set. Gray is never a good secondary color. Gray is perceived (for real, in front of users) as unavailable. Grayed out. Users can work it out, but its not great. And, there was no consideration of shape (aside from the text vs. button) or size. Size doesn't have to mean there are two button standards; "submit" and "cancel" are basically identically long. I (and content people I have worked with) always tried to make the cancel action shorter, much shorter if possible, than the submit action. More like "Save changes" and "Back." This does help. Shape and color can be pursued really interestingly if you want to. Bank of America used to have these neat color/shape items accompanying their buttons. From memory, they were something like this. Sprint uses these little GT symbols for some buttons, and I occasionally tried to use the GT version on the submit, and nothing for cancel, but am not sure if it matters with the lack of much implication for the symbol, its frequent use as a bullet point across the site, and its relatively low contrast as a while element on a colored button. Additionally, forms are hardly ever as neat at those he's got in there. There's lots of discussion of forms going right down the left side, then you arrive at the buttons. But even this over-simplified version the country selector immediately above the buttons requires the user to jog over to the right. While there is mention of form F being least efficient due to fixation times, I see bounces left and right in all the tested cases. How much change? How much impact on total time? Could a different visual treatment of the page itself have changed how this worked? Overall, I've had very good results with the purportedly failed version E. Submit/continue on the right works well, especially for multi-step processes. But it does need to be consistently used, the graphic design of the page needs to support it, and secondary buttons need to be differentiable even without positional changes. Of course, I don't have access to Sprint's research, couldn't share it in detail if I did, and don't have a laser to shine in people's eyes to prove this, so what do I know?